


Chimerical

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Sunless Sea
Genre: Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Poetry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-02 19:07:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13324590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: A collection of short stories, each themed on a Neathbow color.





	1. Dawn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _C lights COSMOGONE, the colour of remembered suns. The fecund, the foetid, the fungal: these flourish in the glow of cosmogone._

Born the scion of an unasked-for darkness, the Flame-Haired Child’s dreams were all of light. Amid tangles of too-green foliage and the cries of unfamiliar beasts, she stood in warmth and life that she had never known the Neath to contain. Face turned toward the light, eyes closed, the darkness behind them burned red-gold like her hair. Each awakening to the prosaic world of candles, smoky fires, and false-stars left her without rancor, only eager to recapture what she had seen.

While her parents hoarded their memories of sun and surface like misers, imprisoning them in a remembered past, she transformed hers into words and the colors she could closest bring to those she saw in her dreams. As the iron-spined former Liverpudlian hired to tutor her frowned over her depictions of wheels within burning wheels and seeds the color of dying suns ("metaphorical landscapes," she replied innocently, when pressed) she devoured the mysticism and science of a different age, a different world. The texts of Levi and Blavatsky held promise, as did the prophecies of Blake with their promise of enlightenment in the wholeness of Albion. She did not truly understand, however, until one afternoon on a heavily-chaperoned walk to Tyrant's Gardens. As her mother engaged a passing acquaintance in conversation and her governess busied herself with the next day's lesson plan, the Child's face turned with a number of others toward the distant, oddly illuminated spires of the Bazaar proper. Over the relevant wall a strange flash of rose-amber light glowed for a moment with a vividity like dream only to vanish forthwith, its afterimage veiling her view of the surrounding park like a dark, filmy curtain.

“The sun!” someone cried, and the Flame-Haired Child wondered.

_***_

_The cabin smelled of tar, brine-saturated air, and the sour sharpness of unwashed bodies not entirely covered by toilet water and pomades. Her attempts to sketch thwarted by the rocking ship and by the fickle flickering of the jar of Phosphorescent Scarabs serving for illumination, she sat back to consider the vague, shifting landscape of dark water visible through the nearby porthole. Tiny points of light formed and shattered, formed and shattered on the surface of the Zee, creating their own small false constellations in mimicry of the greater ones that shifted in the dark mockery of a sky above._

_Clearly there was little enough to be done before journey's end. She retreated to the bunk she shared with a man believed by many to be a Snuffer considering his great passion for candles. Ignoring such murmurs around them both, she allowed sleep to overcome her, reveling in the irony of the brief darkness before the light._

_***_

A tragic accident involving an Unfinished Man and a coal-wagon left her an orphan at a young age. Sixteen months under the stewardship of an elderly male relative followed before, upon her majority, she quietly took control of her parents’ assets under the Masters’ new property laws. In the absence of a reliable income she welcomed into her ancestral home a grizzled Campaigner late of troubles on the Carnelian Coast who wore the scars she had earned in ‘68 with belligerent pride. The soldier's helpmeet and love, a small, dark, bohemian woman who hosted occasional salons in the house’s cramped parlor, was exactly the kind of modern Londoner the new-minted Flame-Haired Landlady’s parents would have disapproved of intensely. As such, the Landlady spent the majority of her sparse leisure time engaging her in artistic debate and very occasionally besting her at whist or chess. Between the two of them the narrow townhouse filled with clay, canvas, lacquer, fabric, the profusion of candles that burned on every surface turning the cluttered workspaces into a Master’s treasure hoard of wonders merely waiting to take shape.

Her newfound funds allowed her to find a space for her own abstractions in a Veilgarden gallery slightly more respectable than a graffitied rookery and occasionally prone to sales to those who possessed or affected scandalous taste. “The Degeneration of Art,” the broadsheets sneered of the strange geometries, bringing viewers first in trickles, then droves. Hers were purchased as often as not, keeping her in the alizarin red and sulfur-tuft yellow that, judiciously mixed, produced the closest shade to what she desired. With these purchases came accolades from those who saw and—on occasion—understood. The latter viewers' murmurs of  _sunlight_ and  _longing_ and  _like a burning cinder, the heart of a star_ provided a greater satisfaction still.

_***_

_The refractions began some hours from their intended port: tiny facsimiles of a greater rainbow scattered across the scuffed cabin floor. She stepped onto the deck where her fellow passengers gathered at the rail, marveling at the yawning crystal chasm that now received the steamer at the side of an immaculately-kept dock. Along the pier, men, women, and others in immaculate military fashions milled about, some pushing carts full of boxes, some directing crews of sweating laborers into and out of commercial vessels, some passing further back into the Grand Geode’s cavernous interior on incomprehensible errands._

_Despite the name, Zelo's Town seemed to be less a conventional living space than a naval port. In lieu of houses, revolving shifts of hard, bright-eyed officers came and went from what looked to be dormitories carved into the translucent interior itself, whistling and laughing their way toward inscrutable military tasks or toward a dockside canteen signed with a sun cresting a pair of scales. The Flame-Haired Recent Arrival had eyes for nothing at which the few traders and occasional Fifth City tourists gaped, focusing her gaze only on the source of the prismatic refractions to the south, a glow that, even at this distance, was apparent over the sighing black Zee._

_Twining a bright tress about her finger, she stepped down the gangplank into a throng of stevedores and bewildered-looking Londoners. Her progress toward the interior barred—_ "beg pardon, ma'am, no civilians past the dock" _—she made for the Sun and Scales. In anticipating of something she could not explain she consumed a plate of portobello roast with potatoes, the stodgy fare rendered even more tasteless by her distraction, laid down the last of her remaining Echoes, and started back along the pier, this time away from the ship which had brought her to the place she now found herself._

_In a small boat—not a formal ferry by any means, hardly more than a rowboat one might find on a Tyrant’s Gardens lock—she found the man her fellow passengers had believed a Snuffer. As their eyes met, she could not bring herself to be surprised as he shifted to one side on the bench._

_***_

The suggestions seemed random, at first. A particular configuration of tea leaves. The round, neat pattern of fruiting bodies in a neighbor’s front garden. Oddly similar games of chess with her bohemian paying-guest in between fevered bouts of artistic clarity that struck her at times, their slow progress forming… what? Once, a wall covered in the graffiti Ladybones Road prided itself on caught her notice, leaving a single sigil burned into the Flame-Haired Observer’s mind: _A Bright Place._

She had heard the word “Correspondence” but had little enough knowledge, her impressions mainly gained from artistic gossip. Public lectures at Benthic College revealed theories of infinite variety and invention but little substance. Texts were, of course, heavily censored by the Ministry of Public Decency, and thus her own experiments in translation through the medium of her own art proved the most fruitful. Her lodger’s salons yielded a handful of Correspondence Studies students who served to corroborate some of these translations, as did some very few of her beloved Blake texts. Through the conjecture, the scoffing, and the uncertainty surrounding phenomena unexplainable by the processes of the Enlightenment, the Flame-Haired Observer began to understand.

Experimentation left her mind burning with aureoles like eyes in the wake of a glare, left her fire-hued hair smouldering in earnest. The glyphs she carefully copied from their antique plaques never produced more than a glimpse of the strange, dreamlike hue she sought, one that flickered and sparked around the edges of cooling ash or warped metal plating with maddening uncertainty. These forays into understanding only revealed the true extent of her ignorance. Attuned as she might have been, the answers did not lie in the city of her birth, nor what the dreams she might access from such a place. With every frenzied spate of orange-gold mockery on canvas and every examination of the wheels within wheels that had begun to appear to her more and more regularly of late, the clearer this fact became. Faced with a language she could not understand yet somehow connected to everything she had ever wanted—what could she do but pursue what signs she might?

Somewhere between conjecture, gossip, and the intuition of this language, all signs seemed to point south. She sold her least important paintings and belongings, transferred the townhouse deeds to the Grizzled Campaigner and her _bohemiénne_ , and boarded the first tramp steamer bound for the Grand Geode.

_***_

_The taciturn not-a-Snuffer manned the oars as she scrutinized the water for ships, stalactites, zee-beasts. Born along on tides that answered no celestial body she had ever seen, the boat sailed forward into a burgeoning glow that suffused the air and water like the opposite of a fog. Her body, having known nothing but sheltering, stifling Neath darkness, trembled as if chilled and perspired in the heat that intensified with every stroke of the oars. Nothing in her dreams, nothing in waking life, had ever suggested the surfeit of light that turned zee-water to flame, the colors of her clothing and flesh to more vivid hues than any amount of fire or scarabs or glim-light had ever permitted.  
_

_Through the glow, the mobile shapes became apparent so gradually that the boat had passed nearly below them before she was able to accept that she saw truly. Wheels within wheels turned above them like the heavenly spheres in an orrery as large as the heavens themselves, soaring above their heads as the skiff drew ever closer. Now it shuddered with a flaw in whatever grand mechanism turned the London-sized wheels, now sparking with a color that made her eyes burn with tears of pain and joy. Along the edge of each wheel gyred burning runes, some of which she knew even now._ Falling From a Great Height. Matters of Love. Dreams.

The Light of Remembered Suns.

_A leather volume had, she noted through her tears, appeared in the hands of her candle-hoarding companion. The pages bore frenzy-scribbled, inked circles that she did not need to compare to the paintings in her valise to know how they might fit together in the wheels of the grand orrery._

_Not abstractions. Not geometries. Blueprints, for an imperfect device striving for the perfection of what it emulated._

_Hand clasping her companion’s over the oar, the Flame-Haired Engineer sailed forward into judgement._


	2. Violant: A Response

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _V marks VIOLANT when blood is shed in a spired place. Violant ink is employed for the most desperate treaties._

1\. From deep Beneath, o’ershadowed by strange spires

We live, and die, and live once more - our days

Not counted by the bright celestial choirs

So many, in nostalgia, remember

But by the deeper rhythms of this place

We name home by a trait’rous queen’s disgrace.

 

2\. Amid strange tides and glimm’rings, the disgrace

Of beings who ceded all to those spires

Is mirrored in this strange, forgetful place

So removed from bright, memorable days

Above, which those who seek to remember

Hold in their hearts, with songs of distant choirs.

 

3\. From other, distant stars, far heavenly choirs

Came strange, forgetful creatures, in disgrace

Banished here by star-folk who remember

Their ancient pact with this being of spires

Imprisoned in this Earth, to mark no days

But languish in this strange, forgetful place.

 

4\. Yet the five cities stolen to this place

Hold in their hearts the earthly, ancient choirs

Of memory, of all those brighter days

And embrace Violant, _sans_ the disgrace

Of Irrigo-mired Lorn-Flukes, things of spires

Who lurk below, and long to remember.

 

5\. Violant! In its presence, remember

All that has passed, and passes, in this place

Fourth’s horse-carven pillars, Third’s blood-drenched spires

And back and back through centuries! Let choirs

Sing of what once fell, down into disgrace

And mourning for those happier, brighter days.

 

6\. Let its hues glow in these quintescent days

We’ll shun oblivion, and remember

The present’s glory, and the past’s disgrace

‘Midst ink and irrigo, in this strange place

In hues of bright-spilled blood we’ll lift our choirs

To glory and remembrance ‘mid dark spires.

 

In these, our latter days, we’ll mark our place

In Violant - remember all the choirs

That sang before disgrace, and sing ‘mid spires.


End file.
